Smart Search® Plus

Along with the phenomenal growth of the internet, we have also noted a dramatic increase in the crimes charged in the Federal criminal justice system. US Department of Justice data suggests that approximately 10% of the 2 million people incarcerated in the US are in the Federal Bureau of Prison’s custody and of the 6.8 million people under some form of probation or parole 10% are being supervised by the Federal government as opposed to a state corrections department. The bureaus of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), The FBI, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Secret Service, and Homeland Security all file criminal charges in the Federal Criminal Justice System.

Federal criminal records are maintained entirely separately from state criminal records by the Federal court system in each state. This is where the Smart Search Plus comes in handy: these records require first determining where the applicant has lived and then checking the Federal court records in each state. Now, many crimes such as Identity Theft, Credit Card Fraud, Bank Fraud, Drug Trafficking, Kidnapping, Embezzlement, Bank Robbery, Weapons Charges, Internet Child Pornography, Tax Evasion, Counterfeiting, Internet Related Sex Crimes, Tax Refund Fraud, and many others are prosecuted in the Federal criminal justice system and not in the state or county criminal courts. In these cases, an applicant who has not incurred a criminal record in a state or county court may have a serious criminal record in the Federal court system.

Those Federal criminal records would go undetected in the course of a traditional state and county criminal record background search. As a result, most of our clients now routinely choose to include a check of Federal criminal records on their prospective employees. In that connection, we have developed a new product that addresses the need to include a search for serious criminal activity which will only appear in the Federal criminal records systems. The Criminal Records Smart Search® Plus is just as fast and easy as our Smart Search and will be included in your menu. Simply select the Criminal Records Smart Search® Plus from your order menu, and the appropriate Federal jurisdictions will automatically be searched for you along with the state and county records already searched with the Smart Search®.

This record would not have been found without a check of the separately maintained Federal criminal records systems which contains about 10 percent of all arrest records. For an example of an applicant with state charges that also had undiscovered violent Federal criminal charges, Click Here. (personal information has been changed) that had no criminal record at the state level but did have a serious Federal criminal record as well as a Federal case currently pending in one of the U.S. Federal District courts. Our newly developed proprietary software allows us to access the Federal criminal records systems in any state an applicant may have lived in. Therefore, a search of multi-state Federal criminal records can be included at a minimal additional cost to the standard criminal record Smart Search.